mental ray for Maya 1.2.1 free Release Notes mental ray for Maya 2018, mental ray 3.14.5.4 Starting with MRFM version 1.2, mental ray GPU acceleration requires CUDA 9 capable driver (on Volta, and on earlier Pascal, Maxwell, Kepler GPUs). NVIDIA Fermi GPU (sm 2.x) support is discontinued. Known issues: Connecting or disconnecting satellites in Resource Manage shelf is not possible during active mental ray Viewport or IPR rendering. Temporary switching Viewport rendered to VP2 and/or closing IPR provides an easy workaround. Changes in version 1.2.1 free This version does not require a license. License management related files have been removed from the distribution. The following issue has been resolved in mental ray core and imf tools: fixed possible format detection of .hdr image files created by third parties. Issues fixed in version 1.2.1 • On Windows platform, fixed failure to install plugin or mental ray standalone if newest NVIDIA display driver is installed. • Fixed possible issues with wide characters filenames. • For tile-based rendering used with GI Next indirect illumination, fixed possible burn out pixel artifacts in user framebuffers. For shader accumulating values in user framebuffers, re- initialization was missing in some cases. • For subdivision surfaces, fixed limit projection of texture vertices in mixed triangle-quad meshes. mental ray for Maya – Release Notes Copyright © 2019 NVIDIA Corporation Release notes for Version 1.2. Plugin Enhancements and Changes Added support for Maya 2018. Fixed possible crashes when switching from mental ray Viewport to Viewport 2.0 and modifying camera or scene after that. Fixed possible missing color transform when exporting to .mi file or when rendering with satellite hosts. Note: in some corner cases, color profile for the camera may still be missing. Invalid file paths in mentalrayTexture nodes can now be re-pathed using the File Path Editor. Fixed possible SynColor color management issue, in particular when using mental ray for Maya plugin with Maya 2017 Update 4. On Mac OSX and Linux platforms, fixed possible issues with user-local paths MDL materials. When rendering on a machine without CUDA-capable GPU, GI Next indirect illumination falls back to CPU. Erroneously, if rendering was done with satellites which had CUDA-capable GPUs, GPU acceleration on satellite was disabled as well. This is fixed now. resources.py script is renamed to mr_resources.py, in order to avoid conflict with other Maya packages. For Maya 2017 Update 4, fixed default port used for satellites in mental ray shelf’s Resource Management dialog. mental ray For GI Next indirect illumination, added support for NVIDIA Volta GPUs. GPU acceleration plugins are built with CUDA 9 compiler now, which implies the requirement on a CUDA 9-capable GPU driver, and discontinues support for NVIDIA Fermi (sm 2.x) GPUs. GI Next indirect illumination rendering performance has been significantly improved, in particular for scenes with uneven complexity distribution. On Linux platform, mental ray would detect professional NVIDIA GPUs even without recent GPU driver installed. For qualified GPUs, this allows usage of professional GPU licenses without driver update, though GPU acceleration itself would not be available. For Material Definition Language (MDL), compiler plugins has been updated with numerous bug fixes and improvements. mental ray for Maya – Release Notes Copyright © 2019 NVIDIA Corporation Release notes for Version 1.1. Plugin Enhancements and Changes Plugin UI Added missing rendering restart for groups or instances created with mental ray Viewport, or when moving groups containing the camera. Set the enable/disable button in the Toolkit when starting the Viewport renderer cannot be started because another rendering is currently running. Avoid unnecessary Viewport rendering restarts when editing materials in Hypershade. Fixed possible freeze when switching between Viewport and RenderCurrentFrame. Fixed possible crash for scenes with camera inside of a group, when hiding was applied to the camera or to the group. Miscellaneous Fixed possible missing displacement. In MRFM 1.1, default texture filtering mode was switched to ray differential based elliptic filtering. As ray differentials are not available for displacement shaders, filtering during displacement is reverted to the old behavior. Fixed Xgen export to .mi archives (exported archives were empty / 0 bytes). Improved handling of missing license errors. Fix possible freeze/endless error loop when batch rendering fails due to missing license. Fixed a crash after unloading mental ray plugin. Fixed possible wrong render layers in batch rendering. For batch rendering, request license only once instead of doing so per pass. Fixed possible slow plugin load if workspace directory contains extensive number of files. MDL shaders are only looked up in the mdl subdir now. Fixed possible parser errors in .mi shader declarations, such as Bifrost. mental ray Fixed possible extensive delays on connecting to misspelled / unreachable satellite hosts. For rendering with MDL materials, fixed possible null tag fatal when using texture name in let statement. Fixed wrong issued warning if a module imports another module from the same archive. mental ray for Maya – Release Notes Copyright © 2019 NVIDIA Corporation For satellite rendering of scenes with MDL materials, fixed possible unknown texture fatal crash when MDL materials on satellites are installed on different paths than on the main/master machine. In particular, this is the case for vMaterials, which are installed on a per-user basis. mental ray for Maya – Release Notes Copyright © 2019 NVIDIA Corporation Release notes for Version 1.1. Known limitations: mental ray for Maya 1.0 / 1.0.1 satellites are not network-compatible with this release and need to be updated. Attaching MILA material after unloaded mental ray for Maya (MRFM) plugin may crash Maya. It is recommended two restart Maya instead of loading plugin for the second time. Plugin UI Added option for Render Current Frame to no longer block UI. Enabled by default, this feature can be disabled under RenderSettings/Configuration/check Advanced Settings/Render Current Frame without Blocking Maya UI. Added GGX glossy model to MILA layering shaders. For MILA layering UI: added history/undo functionality; prevent user from creating invalid connections. Empty or unsupported layer or mix components no longer cause errors or incorrect display in the MILA material UI. Material Viewer renders MDL materials correctly now. For light baking, number of CPU threads used is no longer fixed to 8, but is set to be the number of threads used for frame rendering. Miscellaneous On Mac OSX platform, fixed failure to render Xgen scenes (in earlier versions, this could be work- arounded by starting Maya on a command line). Ray-differential-based MIPMAP pyramid texture filtering is a default now. Improved interoperability with MDL plugin. For scenes imported from older plugin versions, fixed possible inconsistencies in rendering options for progressive and final frame rendering. In particular, for some scenes GI Next indirect illumination was disabled for Render Frame, but enabled in the Viewport. The miUnifiedSampling attribute is deprecated, and its functionality is merged with (previously partially redundant) miRenderUsing attribute. Improved scene translation performance. Fixed unneeded export of MDL materials from previously rendered scenes into new scenes. Fixed crash in translator for scenes with motion blur and grouped camera (exact hierarchy mode). mental ray for Maya – Release Notes Copyright © 2019 NVIDIA Corporation Fixed possible mental ray fatal crash when switching between Viewport and IPR or disabling Viewport after creating nParticles. Mental ray satellites are changed to start with -texture_continue on option. This way, missing local texture files issue errors but no longer trigger fatal issues requiring Maya restart. On Mac OSX platform, fixed failure to start imf_disp tool. Added imf_disp.app to the distribution. On Mac OSX, lmadmin license server included into the package is updated to version 11.14.1.0. Added missing SDK header files to devkit. mental ray For GI Next indirect illumination rendering (GI Next): • Added support for light baking. • Added effective support for (multiple) instancing, with no performance penalties for scenes with large number of unshared instances. • Improved dynamic memory utilization for GPUs with low amount of memory. • Improved rendering performance. • In multihosted rendering precomputation of satellites is slow, so all the precomputation work is now done on the main host. • Fixed possible crash when rendering scenes with (semi-)transparent MDL materials. For MILA layering shaders, added GGX glossy model support. Fixed possible crash when rendering scenes with MILA layering materials with glossy refractions. For tile-based progressive rendering, dynamic tile sizing is not applied if region/windows is specified (earlier version applied it only if the full camera resolution was rendered). For progressive rendering, fixed filtering of user framebuffers. Improved ray tracing acceleration performance for motion blur scenes with nested assemblies. For MILA layering shader and for MDL shaders, added shading normal clamping to improving quality and fixing possible shading artifacts for scenes with strong bump mapping and/or poor quality tessellation. For some scene, this change also has a positive performance impact. For MDL compiler,